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After just a few days, the spin around CIA Director John Ratcliffe’s surprise visit to Russia is already contradicting itself. The initial claim was that the U.S. spy chief made the trip to warn the Kremlin against attacking a NATO state. According to the Wall Street Journal, American officials are worried that Vladimir Putin, “squeezed in Ukraine and under pressure at home, could launch an assault ranging from a cyberattack to a small-scale land incursion.” One day later, a story planted in the New York Times dramatically changed the narrative: Ratcliffe was not there to issue a warning, but to offer friendly, urgent advice. Worried that Vladimir Putin is not receiving “honest assessments of the war’s trajectory and toll,” the CIA director made the trek to “share his bleak assessment of the state of the Russian war against Ukraine, and to urge the Russians to cut a deal.”

The idea of the world’s most powerful intelligence official boarding a C-17A military transport aircraft to make a transatlantic bid for peace in Ukraine is a nice thought. It is also highly implausible.

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Alexander Vindman, a former National Security Council official who rose to fame as a star witness in Donald Trump’s first impeachment, has become the latest neoconservative candidate to lose a Democratic primary. In a major upset, Vindman was defeated Tuesday by State Representative Angie Nixon, a democratic socialist and Medicare-for-All advocate, in the race for Florida’s Democratic Senate nomination. He lost despite national name recognition and a 16-to-one fundraising advantage. Whereas Vindman spent $2 million on ads, Nixon spent less than $60,000.

Nixon, one of only two state lawmakers to call for a ceasefire in Gaza after Israel began its post-October 7^th mass murder spree, ran a spirited grassroots campaign that tapped into her experience as a union organizer. By contrast, Vindman, a staunch supporter of Israel, wrote her off and treated his victory as a foregone conclusion. He refused to debate Nixon and rarely mentioned her by name. According to one veteran political consultant, Vindman “literally laughed at Angie Nixon” and “didn’t even think he was in a primary.” In one of his campaign’s few acknowledgments of his opponent, Vindman’s wife mocked Nixon on social media for failing to wear “professional clothes” — a jab for which she was forced to apologize.

After the recent defeat of Rep. Dan Goldman in New York, Vindman is now the second major figure from Ukrainegate, the scandal behind Trump’s first impeachment, to lose a Democratic primary. Vindman triggered the controversy by reporting concerns about the infamous July 2019 phone call between Trump and Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky. Vindman, who was born in Ukraine, was outraged because Trump had paused a weapons shipment to Kyiv while pressuring its government to assist with his political grievances, primarily getting to the bottom of the effort to frame his presidency as a Russian operation.

Vindman supported the policy of arming Ukraine against Russian-backed rebels in the Donbas rather than using Washington’s post-Maidan leverage to end the fight. The impeachment scandal that he generated cemented this agenda to an unprecedented degree. While Democrats presented their case as a valiant defense of the U.S. democratic process, the underlying message was at stark odds with any such principle. According to Vindman and other impeachment witnesses, American foreign policy was no longer the purview of an elected president, but of unelected bureaucrats. As House Democrats put it, Trump, by freezing the weapons shipment, had acted “against the interests of U.S. national security, and over the objections of these career experts.”

The possibility that an elected president could overrule “career experts” was particularly vexing to star witness Vindman. “I knew the president had clear and straightforward talking points—I’d written them,” he recounted in his memoir of the Trump-Zelensky call. “He was to congratulate Zelensky, show support for Ukraine’s reform and anti-corruption agenda, and urge caution regarding the Russians.” But the insubordinate president, Vindman complained, “wasn’t using my talking points at all.” Ignoring Vindman’s holy writ wasn’t the president’s only transgression. His heretical pause on the Ukraine military package “was baffling. Not only was it a 180-degree turn from the stated policy the entire U.S. government supported, but it was also contrary to U.S. national-security interests in the region.” When it came to “official Ukraine policy,” Vindman added, there was “broad consensus in the diplomatic and military parts of the administration. What exactly, we wondered, was the president doing?”

It did not occur to Vindman and his fawning media cheerleaders, particularly on MSNBC, to ask the inverse question: in deciding that national security mandarins could overrule an elected president, what were they doing? Many Democratic and Republican lawmakers surely shared Vindman’s objections, and his view of Ukraine as “a frontline state and a bulwark against Russian aggression.” Yet under the longstanding norms of U.S. democracy, setting “official Ukraine policy” is the commander-in-chief’s prerogative. The Constitution, it turns out, contains no exception for executive policies that contradict the “broad consensus” of unelected subordinates.

In articles for The Nation at the time, I warned that “the Cold War mindset that liberals have embraced threatens not just their own political fortunes but also global peace.” On the latter front, by cementing a bipartisan consensus to arm Ukraine rather than encourage it to make peace with Russia, Ukrainegate paved the way for Russia’s invasion of February 2022, and all of its catastrophic consequences. When it comes to Democrats’ political fortunes, Trump is now in his second term. Vindman was elevated to Democratic stardom in an era when Cold War dogma was treated as the anti-Trump party line. He has now become the latest establishment stalwart to learn that Democratic voters want to resist the Republican agenda with policies that center humanity, not the bipartisan militarism of “career experts.”

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Four months into President Donald Trump’s first stint in office, the FBI launched a counterintelligence investigation of him as a suspected asset of the Russian government. At the direction of then-acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe, the FBI sought to determine if Trump “was directed by, controlled by, and/or coordinated activities with, the Russian Federation,” and accordingly posed “threats to the national security of the United States.”

The predicate for this unprecedented probe of a sitting president as the agent of a foreign power has been kept from the public ever since. When I obtained the first public release of its opening document in late 2024, just weeks before Trump’s second term, the FBI redacted the entire “articulable factual basis.” After more than nine years of secrecy, a new declassification by the Trump White House confirms that the investigation, codenamed “Oxferd Comma” [sic] and launched on May 16, 2017, was not driven by any secret information tying Trump to Russia. It was instead based on the FBI leadership’s maximalist, neoconservative-influenced reactions to innocuous and falsely reported public events.

One of the FBI’s triggers was a controversy that erupted in July 2016 at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland. At the time, Washington Post columnist Josh Rogin claimed that the Trump campaign had removed an amendment from the party’s platform that called for arming Ukraine in its fight against Russian-backed rebels in the Donbas region. In reality, the RNC platform committee had merely rejected a proposal to endorse providing “lethal defensive weapons” to Ukraine. The Republicans’ final platform text instead called for “increasing sanctions” on Russia and “appropriate assistance to the armed forces of Ukraine,” which could easily have included weapons. The RNC platform was also far more hawkish than the Democrats’ platform that same summer, in line with the policies of President Obama, who had refused to send the same weaponry to Ukraine.

All of this was known at the time. Yet nearly one year later, the FBI decided that the issue flagged by Rogin’s exaggerated opinion column was grounds to suspect that Trump was working for Russia. According to the newly released, fully-declassified “Electronic Communication” that opened the probe, the FBI noted with alarm that “this platform change would be favorable to Russian interests” and that a Trump foreign policy advisor, JD Gordon, publicly admitted “that he pushed the platform change to align with Trump’s views.” Even assuming that a meaningless platform change would somehow help “Russian interests,” the FBI had decided that Trump’s purported “views” – whether the bureau had accurately described them or not – were sufficient grounds to investigate him as an agent of Moscow.

The document only underscores that the FBI’s Trump-Russia investigation was influenced by Cold War views and the conspiracy theories of an illicit Trump-Russia connection promoted by the Hillary Clinton campaign and its media allies.

Back in July 2016, Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook declared that Trump had personally “changed the platform” to make it “more pro-Russian.” That same week, Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor of The Atlantic, cited the RNC story as among the reasons to conclude that Trump had chosen to “unmask himself as a de facto agent of Russian President Vladimir Putin.” In his Clinton-funded fictional “dossier,” former UK intelligence officer Christopher Steele wrote that the Trump camp “had agreed to sideline Russian intervention in Ukraine as a campaign issue” in exchange for Russia’s election help. After Trump took office, MSNBC host Rachel Maddow declared that the dossier’s allegation of “essentially a quid pro quo between Russia and the Donald Trump campaign” over the platform change was the “latest” of Steele’s claims that “falls into place.”

In this neo-McCarthyite climate, it became an article of faith not only that Trump’s presidency was the product of a conspiracy with Moscow, but that the president himself was vulnerable to Russian financial leverage and outright blackmail. The FBI’s newly declassified document indicates that the bureau took its cues from this prevailing supposition as well. “Open source information indicates that President Trump has had longstanding business and real estate ties in Russia and former Soviet states, stemming from the late 1980s,” the document states. Yet the only concrete example of this is a widely circulated 2008 quote attributed to Trump’s son, Donald Trump Jr., who “claimed that Russians made up a ‘disproportionate cross-section’ of many of President Trump’s assets.” Trump Jr. was celebrating the fact that wealthy Russians were buying up Trump-branded foreign luxury properties, unaware of the possibility that this would one day be seen as grounds to investigate his father for taking orders from Vladimir Putin.

The FBI’s decision to investigate Trump over the meaningless Ukraine weaponry-related platform change became a self-fulfilling prophecy. Upon taking office, neoconservatives in Trump’s cabinet and on Capitol Hill exploited the allegations that he was a Russian asset to convince him to authorize arming Ukraine in ways that Obama had refused, out of fears of fueling an escalation. When Trump briefly paused one such weapons shipment in 2019 while pressuring Ukraine to assist with his Russiagate-fueled political vendettas, House Democrats impeached him. Trump’s decision to arm Ukraine, along with the impeachment controversy, helped sabotage the Minsk peace accords, the internationally endorsed pact for ending the Donbas civil war. Ukraine’s refusal to implement Minsk, with U.S. encouragement, ultimately helped trigger Russia’s February 2022 invasion. (The full story is told in my forthcoming book, “Their Blood, Our Bullets.”)

The FBI’s counterintelligence probe of Trump followed an earlier investigation of his campaign members, codenamed “Crossfire Hurricane,” which was opened the previous July. Previous declassifications show that this probe was just as baseless. The FBI acted on hearsay that a Trump campaign volunteer, George Papadopoulos, had made a “suggested ... suggestion” of possible, unspecified Russian help to the campaign. Yet the FBI deemed this vague piece of gossip sufficient to launch arguably the most consequential national security investigation in U.S. history.

Both investigations were folded into the inquiry led by Robert Mueller, who was appointed just one day after the FBI began portraying Trump internally as a possible Russian agent or conspirator. Mueller’s final report “did not establish that members of the Trump campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities.”

The new declassification comes one year after the public also belatedly learned that Mueller and U.S. intelligence leaders concealed doubts at the highest level about Russiagate’s core allegation: that Moscow interfered in the election to help Trump defeat Clinton. A previously unpublished Intelligence Community Assessment, circulated within the government on September 12, 2016, stated that the FBI and the National Security Agency had “low confidence” that Russia was behind the hack and release of Democratic Party emails. Emails also showed that the head of the NSA, Mike Rogers, complained that his analysts were denied access to the underlying intelligence used to make the attribution to Russia. Rather than address Rogers’ concerns, James Clapper, the Director of National Intelligence, denied his request and told him to acquiesce. “It is essential that we (CIA/NSA/FBI/ODNI) be on the same page ... in the highest tradition of ‘that’s OUR story, and we’re stickin’ to it,’” Clapper wrote. “... This is one project that has to be a team sport.”

After yet another nine-year delay, the public has learned more details of how top intelligence officials stuck to their deception in a sprawling, and still unraveling, effort to tie Trump to Russia.

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Eulogies for political figures are prone to embellishment, but President Trump’s speech at the funeral for the late Senator Lindsey Graham offered one moment of candor. “He was extremely hawkish,” Trump said. “I can tell you, he never saw a war that he didn’t like.”

With both Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in attendance, Graham’s memorial service showcased how his two favorite wars are increasingly converging.

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In just two days this month, the new government of Syria was handed a pair of major victories toward reversing the country’s longstanding pariah status in the US-dominated global order.

At the NATO summit in Turkey, President Trump announced the removal of Syria from the list of states accused of sponsoring terrorism. Trump’s decision will ease decades of sanctions that have crippled Syria’s economy and helped oust Bashar al-Assad in December 2024. It also marks a public relations victory for Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa, the insurgent leader who replaced Assad in Damascus. Al-Sharaa, previously known as Abu Mohammad al-Jolani, is a former ISIS deputy leader and the founding leader of the Syrian affiliate of Al Qaeda, both designated by the US as terrorist organizations.

The following day, the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) gave Syria’s ruling Al Qaeda offshoot another stamp of international approval. The Executive Council of the world’s top chemical watchdog restored the voting privileges that Syria lost in 2021 over allegations that the Assad government used chemical weapons and hid elements of its arsenal.

The two decisions have a direct tie. The widespread narrative that the Syrian government used chemical weapons against its own people was invoked to justify the US-led regime change war that ultimately led to Assad’s overthrow.

Yet while the Trump administration and OPCW are granting Syria’s new rulers a clean slate, not everyone is ready to turn the page, or accept the conventional story about the former government’s purported chemical attacks.

The OPCW leadership faces continued scrutiny over a cover-up that calls the Syria chemical weapons allegations, and the OPCW’s own independence and scientific integrity, into question. During this month’s session of the Executive Council, the Brazilian government lodged a rare formal protest over the OPCW’s manipulation of an investigation into an alleged April 2018 chemical attack in the Syrian town of Douma.

At issue for the Brazilians was the suppression of a critical finding in the OPCW’s Douma probe. As I reported in May, the OPCW, after years of stonewalling, recently acknowledged concealing the “highly protected” assessment of German military toxicologists who ruled out chlorine gas as the cause of dozens of deaths in Douma.

The toxicologists’ censored findings, along with other buried evidence, undermined the OPCW’s public claims that there was a chlorine attack in Douma, and that the Syrian government was responsible. The suppressed evidence instead pointed to a false flag, as one of the toxicologists even speculated. After keeping this from the public, the OPCW published reports on the Douma incident that aligned with the first-term Trump administration and its British and French allies. These states bombed Syria in April 2018 over what they alleged was a Syrian government chemical attack in Douma.

In Brazil’s National Statement to the Council, Ambassador Fernando Simas Magalhães argued that the OPCW cover-up calls into question the Douma investigation’s legitimacy. “Recent findings,” Magalhães said, “...have pointed to the exclusion of expert toxicological opinions from the final Douma report, which may have had an impact on the robustness of the conclusions of the investigation.”

The “recent findings” refer to a legal case at the Administrative Tribunal of the Geneva-based International Labour Organisation (ILO). The tribunal ruled in favor of Dr. Brendan Whelan, a former OPCW inspector who challenged the manipulation of the Douma probe. During those legal proceedings, the OPCW inadvertently acknowledged the very act that Whelan had been protesting as a Douma team member since 2018: that the Organisation was guilty of scientific censorship.

The Brazilian government’s high-level rebuke is not the first time that the OPCW has been challenged over the suppression of the toxicological findings. Yet each time the issue has been raised, OPCW Director-General Fernando Arias has refused to even acknowledge it, let alone respond.

Brazil’s intervention is unique because it was made during a formal session of the OPCW’s policy-making organ, the Executive Council. Accordingly, it had to be recorded in the Organisation’s official records and posted publicly, at Brazil’s request. After years in which the OPCW evaded questions about the toxicologists’ buried findings, the issue is now, for the first time, permanently memorialized on the chemical watchdog’s own website. Arias has yet to offer a response.

In his statement, the Brazilian ambassador also framed the credibility crisis inside the OPCW over the Douma cover-up and its broader Syria mandate as not just the responsibility of the Technical Secretariat (TS), the working body headed by Director-General Arias, but principally of the Member States of the OPCW and the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC):

At present, [the OPCW] faces the challenge of sustaining effectiveness and confidence in an increasingly complex and polarised environment. This responsibility lies primarily with member states, with the support of the TS. One area where these pressures are most clearly reflected is the Syria file.

In other words, Brazil argued, it is the Secretariat’s paymasters, the Member States, which must ensure the Organisation’s credibility.

At a UN Security Council briefing in June, China’s ambassador similarly argued that the OPCW’s activities in Syria “have become a hallmark of the OPCW being politicized, seriously jeopardizing its authority and effectiveness.” Echoing Brazil’s criticism, China also suggested that the OPCW has failed to “maintain an objective and impartial position” in its Syria probes, which risk failing to “stand the test of history.”

Brazil is well-placed to challenge the OPCW’s politicization. The watchdog’s founding director-general, José Bustani, is a veteran Brazilian diplomat who personally resisted another attempt to instrumentalize the organization for a US-led regime change campaign in the Middle East. In 2002, the Bush administration engineered Bustani’s ouster for trying to facilitate Iraq’s entry into the Chemical Weapons Convention, which impeded the White House’s plans for war. Bustani stood his ground even after then-US Under Secretary of State John Bolton threatened to harm his children. Nearly two decades later, Bustani tried to testify at the UN in protest of the Douma cover-up, but the US and its allies blocked him from speaking. By contrast, these same states have continued to heap praise on Arias as he’s joined them in stonewalling accountability for the Douma deception.

Bustani and former senior UN official Hans von Sponeck have spearheaded the Berlin Group 21, an initiative to address the OPCW scandal. Ahead of the Executive Council, the group sent a letter to each state party urging that “the issues raised by the OPCW’s own scientists be addressed in an open, transparent and objective manner.” By insisting on accountability for the manipulated Douma investigation, Brazil is refusing to let the OPCW fail the test of history.

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Shortly before returning to the White House for a second term, Donald Trump criticized the exiting president, Joe Biden, for letting Ukraine fire long-range US missiles into Russia. “Why are we doing that?” Trump complained. “We’re just escalating this war and making it worse.”

Just as his campaign pledge of “no new wars” gave way to a regime-change war on Iran, Trump’s professed aversion to a US-fueled escalation in Ukraine is no more. At this month’s NATO summit in Turkey, Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio endorsed Ukraine’s drone attacks deep inside Russia. With the Russians “finding it more difficult to defend their own airspace,” Rubio explained, this will “create the space now to negotiate the end of this war.” Added Trump: “It’s an escalation, but it’s also an escalation that could help lead to an end.”

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My debut book, Their Blood, Our Bullets: The Hidden Story of the US–Russia War for Ukraine, published by OR Books, is now available for pre-order. I have been working on this project for 3+ years, and am very excited to finally get it out. I am particularly grateful to my Substack subscribers: without your support, this book would not have been possible.

ABOUT THE BOOK

In this bombshell investigation, years in the making, Aaron Maté exposes Washington’s professed support for Ukrainian sovereignty and democracy as a sham.

Building on the rigorous, fearless reporting that has established him as a leading independent journalist, Maté irrefutably documents how the US and its NATO allies have meddled in Ukraine with the real aim of weakening and destabilizing Russia.

In pursuit of this aggressive geopolitical design, successive US administrations exploited Ukraine’s internal divisions and sabotaged every chance for compromise while relentlessly backing Russia into a corner. Gambling with the global economy and risking nuclear war, US planners then provoked and prolonged an illegal Russian invasion that has had catastrophic consequences—for the Ukrainian people above all.

Washington’s cynical foreign policy did not just detonate peace in Europe but also deranged politics at home. Controversies around Russia and Ukraine played a pivotal role in three consecutive US presidential campaigns, driving the national hysteria known as “Russiagate” as well as the first impeachment of Donald Trump.

With Trump’s re-election pledge to broker peace still elusive, Maté presents a groundbreaking account of how the Russia–Ukraine conflict came to be, and how a brutal proxy war with existential stakes for humanity can finally be resolved.

Pre-order “Their Blood, Our Bullets”, at 15% off, via OR Books.

A sweeping victory by a progressive slate in New York’s Democratic primary – Claire Valdez, Brad Lander, and Darializa Avila Chevalier – adds significant momentum to the political movement of their chief endorser, New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani, and his populist, pro-Palestine message.

Bernie Sanders’ crushing 2020 primary loss to Joe Biden, which many progressives (myself included) believed he would take handily, offered a sobering warning about extrapolating national political lessons from coastal leftist enclaves. But the Biden administration then went on to endorse Israel’s mass murder campaign in Gaza, and paid a political price for it in the 2024 election. Last night’s results continue that trend.

Lander’s victory over Daniel Goldman, a Levi Strauss heir and cable news mainstay, would have been unthinkable just a few years ago. Goldman rose to prominence in late 2019, when he served as the Democrats’ lead attorney in their first impeachment of President Trump. Right after the collapse of Russiagate, Democrats doubled down on their Cold War playbook by targeting Trump for freezing a weapons shipment to Ukraine while he pressured it to assist with his political vendettas. In a series of columns for the Nation magazine, I warned that Democrats were hurting their election chances by centering Cold War dogma over pocketbook issues. “It is difficult to recall a time in recent memory when liberal US politics has been centered on issues so divorced from reality and from issues that matter to people’s lives,” I wrote.

That is no longer the case. The ascent of neoconservative Democrats like Goldman during the Russiagate/Ukrainegate era pushed the party further to the right. That shift became politically untenable after October 7^th, when voters saw party leaders from Biden on down defend the indefensible in Gaza. In recent years, Goldman has tried to offset his hawkish foreign policy by embracing popular domestic positions like Medicare For All. But his support for Israel sealed his political fate.

During the primary campaign, Goldman invoked his role in Trump’s first impeachment. Once an issue that riveted MSNBC audiences, it failed to land in a time of economic stagnation and a live-streamed genocide. Tellingly, the cable news voice most visibly alarmed at Goldman’s defeat last night was none other than Fox News’ chief Trump cheerleader Sean Hannity, who choked up while reporting the news of what he called “a pretty scary transformation... in the Democratic Party.”

The transformation is not exclusive to Democrats. Two longtime Trump allies, former Fox news host Tucker Carlson and former Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, have both said in recent days that they can no longer support the Republican Party. Both have broken with Trump over his support for Israel and his failed regime change war on Iran.

Back in 2016, Trump appealed to a winning margin of swing state voters by criticizing costly regime change wars. He disingenuously repeated that message in 2024, capitalizing on Biden’s proxy war in Ukraine and the genocide in Gaza. Trump has long abandoned any claim to the pro-peace mantle. By contrast, along with their support for Palestinian freedom, two of the winning Mamdani-backed candidates, Chevalier and Valdez, have criticized the US role in the Ukraine-Russia conflict and advocated diplomacy to end it. If one primary night in deep-blue New York City is any guide, an authentic version of anti-war populism now has a political home.

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